Morgan Redman:
Christopher McKenney:
The final photographic response seen above is my sinister surreal piece created as part of shoot seven. There was no direct technique influence for this photograph but it was instead inspired by the dark inferences often hidden within surreal and high fashion photographs and also the importance of editing software in modern photography. My photograph is framed within a square compositional frame to place the singular subject, draped in a cloth to resemble a ghost, within the central vertical column of the rule of thirds grid method to emphasise the natural vignette and lighting of the image which was exaggerated due to the use of flash on a dark foggy evening. The reason that I believe this image to be successful is due to the careful consideration of shooting on location and the variables such as weather, the sinister lighting that captured the eerie connotations that I was hoping to include and also as a result of the difficult editing that ensued post-production which involved attentive and time consuming editing of individual blades of grass to remove the subjects legs from the image and to create a more dramatic and believable surreal final response.
The other final outcome is the work of the modern photographer McKenney who explores surrealism through lowly saturated, well edited dark subject matter. Photographs are usually captured within a square frame with a simplistic colour palette involving white, red, green and brown and often depict a masked or covered subject that is implied to be a ghost, spirit or religious figure. The extreme success of McKenney's work is his idea to focus on a subject which many people fail to address and the way in which his work is so well executed in a beautifully sad way. The locations and characters combine with the high fashion inspired editing to form cohesive bodies of work. For example, one smaller series was entitled "Self-Made Ghosts" in which McKenney captured self-portraits where he is covered with a cloth that mimics the work of the surrealist artist Rene Magritte and some of his famous works such as "The Lovers". This is evidenced in McKenney's response to a question in which he stated "I don't like to give people an identity; I like to focus on the story" and as such McKenney allows his subconscious to form a narrative which he then captures as a reflection of flaws and the human condition. This ideology links strongly to another photographer, Vivian Maier, who served as an inspiration to McKenney through her truthful and unforgiving renditions of both herself and others. The flash firing reflects, in my image, off of the mist and the small tree branch whilst in McKenney's it reflects off the subject and trees to exaggerate the lines and contours of the image.
The ideology of focusing on a theme as opposed to a technique is something that dramatically inspired me and also encouraged my own study of surrealism through ghosts due to the poetic sadness of McKenney's own work. Some similarities between the afore mentioned photographic studies and other bodies of work within McKenney and my own corpus of work include the colourisation of images, framing and themes. To further this, both of the above images employ the same colour palette of green, white, black and brown which are all natural colours and provide a naturalistic interpretation of surrealism which is different from most surrealist who use colour as a simple element to dramatise. Furthermore, the square composition direct the audience to what is considered the most vital features of the image and what should be focused on. Moreover, both images appear to understand the subtle, yet extremely powerful, changes that lighting can make. A difference between the images though is the positioning of the subject in that my final photograph is very much a location portrait whilst McKenney's is more dominated by the portrait and model with the background as a device to emphasise the expression of the subject and the balance between light and dark in photography.
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